


making wishes in the dark

by Stella959



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e07 The Believer, Gen, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28086015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stella959/pseuds/Stella959
Summary: The blaster shot hits the stormtrooper helmet in Din’s hands, knocking the cheap thing out of his grip. It ricochets off the wall behind them and skids clear across the room.Now, he thinks, they might be a little bit fucked.Or, something of a character study following a small what-if AU moment ofChapter 15: The Believer.
Relationships: Din Djarin & Boba Fett, Din Djarin & Cara Dune, Din Djarin & Migs Mayfeld
Comments: 19
Kudos: 287
Collections: My Favorite Gen Fics, Noromo Mando: Mandalorian Genfics Collection





	making wishes in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously, spoilers specifically for Chapter 15: The Believer, and general spoilers for the rest of the season preceding it.

When all hell finally breaks loose in the officer’s mess, Din thinks that they might actually stand a chance of getting out of there alive. Mayfeld is an expert shot, and even if the mess in the mess was his fault to begin with Din can’t say that Mayfeld didn’t do his part in cleaning it up. It’s when Mayfeld is handing him back his helmet and the stormtroopers outside the mess have noticed the ruckus that things go sideways. One of the stormtroopers aims for them and shoots, but just misses the mark. 

Instead, the blaster shot hits the helmet in Din’s hands, knocking the cheap thing out of his grip. It ricochets off the wall behind them and skids clear across the room. Now, he thinks, they might be a little bit fucked. 

As they exchange fire, the stormtroopers’ continued inability to hit — well, really anything of note — tells Din that what hit his helmet must have been one hell of a lucky (or unlucky, as far as he’s concerned) shot. With their back against the windows, Din spares a glance to his helmet, which is, yep, over in the corner past the terminal he’d accessed earlier. Mayfeld’s, of course, is somewhere back on the Juggernaut. And with it being the officer’s mess, they were the only two in the room whose uniform even came with a helmet. The time it would take him to recover his helmet would surely get one or both of them killed, besides blowing any chance they have at escape. 

These calculations run through Din’s mind at light speed as he’s returning phaser fire. Then they’re kicking out the lowest of the shades on the windows and ducking out onto the thin ledge of the refinery’s façade. Din goes first and Mayfeld is right behind him as they hug their way across the remaining shades and toward the roof access. 

###

“I see them!” Fennec calls out. “South wall, halfway up.”

“Got ‘em.” Cara finds the window with her scope, and watches as Mayfeld is chased by a stormtrooper who is too close behind him for comfort; she fires off a quick shot and her target falls off the ledge into the raging waters below. She waits, expecting Mando to climb out behind him, but it’s just a steady stream of stormtroopers that she and Fennec take turns picking off. 

That means that Mando must be ahead of Mayfeld, the other body making its way across the south wall. Except that person is just a tuft of dark hair at the end of her scope, with no helmet in sight. 

“Holy shit.”

“Is that—?”

“Must be.”

That’s all the conversation they have time for, as they have to start picking off the imperials who try and follow their friends out onto the balcony. Cara takes great care to remember not to shoot Mando, and can’t help but wonder what the hell happened inside to lead to this.

###

Boba Fett’s ship retrieves them none too soon, and Din is genuinely impressed by Mayfeld’s parting shot that sets the refinery ablaze. When the wave of heat from the explosion hits his face, Din can’t help but flinch back away from it. He catches Mayfeld watching him, studying his face like he might be quizzed about it later. 

Mayfeld had been decent, earlier, when he’d tried to give Din back his helmet and act like nothing had happened. But now that they were back on the ship, riding to their rendezvous, it was very clear that nothing would ever be the same again.

“Nice shot,” he says to Mayfeld, because the fact that he’s smack dab in the middle of an identity crisis doesn’t mean he can’t give credit where it’s due.

Mayfeld shrugs. “We all need to sleep at night.” He turns and heads into the ship, leaving Din alone with his thoughts. Din, who would like nothing more than to spend the next several hours alone and wallowing in his own self-pity, follows him.

He and Mayfeld strap into the jump seats in the cargo bay, and despite Fett’s evasive maneuvers they manage to stay secured. After Fett drops the seismic charge, he comms to let them know it’s probably safe to move around if they want to go ahead and change out of their borrowed imperial armor. Mayfeld glances over at him again but Din is already unbuckled and standing, making his way to the cupboard where Cara had promised she’d store his armor. 

The door swings open at his touch, and out of the top of the bag he pulls out the piece on top. When he looks into the eyes of his helmet, the unfamiliar features of his own face stare back. The brown eyes that Mayfeld had so quickly picked up on reflect back the naked exhaustion that he feels deeply in his bones. He bites his lip, a nervous habit from his childhood that he’d thought he’s shaken long ago, and watches as bright white teeth pull on chapped pink lips. He runs his free hand through his hair, subconsciously mimicking the motion he’s seen others do all his life without ever having done it himself. 

Din Djarin is at a crossroads, and the time to make his decision is now. He can either take the helmet now, put it on, and pretend like nothing’s changed and nobody saw his uncovered face. This path of action would cause the least amount of conflict in his life, though it would also require asking everyone from today to live the polite fiction of it along with him. Considering the lengths to which each of them had gone to help him, though, he didn’t see that being a problem; Mayfeld had already said as much.

Alternatively, he could forsake the helmet when with his friends and save it for battle and hostile territories. He could live in a style akin to that of Bo Katan or Boba Fett, or somewhere in between. Scattered as they were, Din’s travels had shown him that there were honorable ways to live according to the creed that he’d been raised to adhere to in that dark Nevarro covert. A small part of him felt like such a shift would be a betrayal to those who had raised him, and especially those who had died or discarded their armor for his sake. But that had been their choice, at least as much as it was his choice to do what he must in his search for Grogu.

There is a third option, of course: he could walk away from all of this, right here, right now. He could step off Boba Fett’s ship at the rendezvous and keep walking, make his way into town and start a new life from there. That was the Way that he had been raised to follow, after all: that if he should ever take off his helmet in public, he would have to follow up with the rest of his armor and leave the title of Mandalorian behind with it. But doing so now would mean abandoning Grogu to Moff Gideon, which is wholly unacceptable and therefore not really an option at all.

Din takes the bag of armor out of the cupboard and sits it at his feet. He takes one last look at his reflection in the helmet, and then sets it back gently on the shelf, from which he will retrieve it the next time he is in need. 

In the meantime he will make his own Way, starting here and now with this. 

###

Din reunites with Mayfeld after the ship reorients itself for landing. Mayfeld does a double take when they meet, as if he doesn’t quite believe his own eyes. Mayfeld has already changed out of the harsh imperial uniform that had both washed him out and hardened him in a way that made Din more wary of him than he’d been the first time they’d met. But now, in the muted earth tones of the civilian clothes he’d been given to wear in lieu of a prison uniform, Mayfeld looks infinitely more like himself. 

“What, you lose your other helmet, too?” Mayfeld asks. Where before this mission Mayfeld had done his best to keep his distance from him, he now stands close to him, within an arm’s length, and makes no effort to hide the way he takes in Din’s face. 

“I thought I’d try something new,” Din says slowly. He’s still getting used to how his voice sounds without the speaker on his helmet; to him it sounds soft and small and unsure of itself. But maybe it makes him sound a little more human, too. 

“All right you two, I don’t want to be here any longer than we have to,” Boba calls down from the cockpit. He clambers down a moment later, and then takes an appraising look at Din. He nods once, then sticks out a hand.

“The name’s Boba Fett. I don’t believe I got yours?”

Din laughs, happily surprised. He hadn’t taken into account the fact that showing his face would mean he would need to go by something other than ‘Mando,’ but he thinks it’s something he could get used to. 

“Din,” he says finally. “Din Djarin, but my friends can call me Din.” He meets the outstretched hand with his own, and leans into it when Boba pulls him into an impromptu hug. He’s tense at first, but wills his shoulders and spine into relaxing into the hug; when Boba feels him relax, he hugs him even tighter. 

“It’s good to know your face, Din,” Boba says, clapping him on the back. “I’m honored to be counted as one of your friends.”

Boba pulls back, leaving one hand on Din’s shoulder. “And believe me when I say that I know what it’s like to have a complicated relationship with your own face.” Din knows an offer to talk when he hears it, even when it’s not exactly said aloud. 

Somewhere in the ship a proximity alarm chirps. Boba pats the armor on his shoulder, and then climbs back into the cockpit to quiet the alarm. Meanwhile, Din and Mayfeld go outside to meet the others. 

Fennec walks straight past Din and into the ship without a word; the only indication that she’s even noticed his missing helmet are her raised eyebrows when she meets his eyes as she passes. That’s as good as a shout of surprise, coming from her, and he’ll take it. 

Cara, meanwhile, stops dead in her tracks when she’s still a stone’s throw away. Then she shakes her head, almost imperceptibly, and closes the rest of the distance between them. There’s a ghost of a smirk on her face as she approaches him.

“I thought I put your helmet with the rest of your armor,” she says.

“You did,” Din acknowledges. “It’s safe, and right where you left it.”

The last time he’d been on Nevarro with any time to spare, they’d had a long talk to catch up. Somewhere in there he’d told her about Bo Katan and her team, and what they’d had to say about the covert that had raised him. She’d had some choice words to describe the whole situation, once he’d finished telling her. She knew something about becoming disillusioned with a cause that had once been your whole world, and how much it fucking sucked.

Cara nods once and turns to Mayfeld, who looks resigned to his fate. 

Din has to work hard to keep a smile off his face when Cara turns to him and bemoans Mayfeld’s death, standing not two meters away from the man in question. He plays along because he thinks that a fifty year sentence would destroy the good man who he is just starting to see is somewhere inside Mayfeld. He gives him a single, lazy salute as Mayfeld finally turns away from them and toward his new-found freedom.

“Hey,” Cara says, grabbing his arm once they’re back inside the ship. Fennec is somewhere else, probably talking to Boba, so it’s just the two of them in the small living space. “Don’t overthink this, okay?”

Din gives her an incredulous look. Cara sighs.

“What I mean is, I hope you’re doing this for the right reasons. And if you are, they don’t have to be the right reasons forever. If you decide later that this isn’t for you, and you decide to go back to full Mando, everybody on this ship will support you in that. Everybody who cares about you -- not just the kid, but _you_ \-- will support you in whatever you decide to do. And fuck anyone who doesn’t.”

She reaches up to ruffle his hair then, moving just slow enough that he could dodge if he wanted to. Instead, he leans into it and thinks that small touches like these are something he could get used to.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Fall Out Boy's _My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark_.
> 
> I don't tend to write Star Wars fanfiction because the canon is so expansive and more than a bit intimidating, but this episode hit me like a sack of bricks. I did my best, and if you notice a small piece of trivia/vocab/etc that I got wrong, I'll happily take a nudge in the right direction.
> 
> (also feel free to leave a nice comment or review kthanksbye)


End file.
